He and his people were originally from thousands of miles east of Three Walls, east of the Caspian Sea. They had been from the city of Urgench, a part of the Khoresmian Empire, which stretched from the Arabian Ocean to north of the Aral Sea, and from beyond the Hindu Kush to the shores of the Caspian. To hear Zoltan talk of it, it was next door to Eden, with skies that were never cloudy and the waters ever abundant in the great Amu River that washed down from the never-failing snowfields of the Himalayas.
Ponds and orchards and fields of grain went on forever, a irrigated by the mighty Amu. Dozens of cities rose white and glorious in the sun, each with populations of more than half a million, for the empire was densely populated. Yet such was the abundance of the land that there was plenty for all.
Then the Mongols had come from out of the mountains to the northeast, and had killed the Shah and taken Samarkand and the capital city of Bokhara. The cities were destroyed, and their entire populations murdered. With their armies completely obliterated, with their Shah dead, or some said hunted beyond the shores of the Caspian Sea, with no hope left at all, the Prince of Urgench submitted to Genghis Khan. In return for a ruinous tribute paid to the conqueror, he bought some measure of peace for a few years.
But the tribute demanded increased yearly, and to it was added the demand that all the healthy men must enlist in the armies of the Khan, to fight in foreign wars. Already the required tribute in grain and gold and slaves meant starvation stalked the land. Without the aid of the healthy men, the tribute could not be met. The women, children, and aged might be able to support themselves, if poorly, but there would be no surplus. Without the tribute, the Khan's armies would return, and there would be none to defend against them.
The Prince of Urgench joined with other princes in rebellion against the Mongols, and Urgench was the last city to be destroyed. The surrounding countryside was desecrated in days, and every town, village, and farmhouse was put to the torch. The orchards and vineyards were chopped down for no other reason than the pleasure of their destruction. Women were raped within sight of the city walls, and then their throats were cut when the rapist was done. Whole families were lined up just beyond bowshot, and slaughtered.
Urgench held out for five months against the Mongol horde, until all the arrows had been exhausted, all the food was gone. and even the rats had all been captured and eaten. Then the Mongols had proposed a truce. They said that if the prince would surrender himself, they would let all others in the city live, for only the prince had rebelled against his masters, the others were but dupes who had followed him. The Mongols swore this to Allah. and to their own pagan gods.
The prince took counsel with his nobles, and then voluntarily surrendered himself. As arranged, the prince went out the city gate, and Mongol soldiers took charge of that gate. They beheaded the prince within sight of his subjects, and marched their army within the walls.
Then they said that all must leave the city, for they had sworn to leave the people with their lives, but the city itself was to be destroyed. The people could take what they could carry, but that was all.
As the citizens went through the gate, they were searched, and all weapons were taken from them. They were then sorted into groups, according to their occupations. Each group was separately guarded.
Military officers were the first to be murdered. They were bound hand and foot in sight of their families and then some were strangled and others slashed to death. Their families were soon butchered as well, except for a few hundred attractive young women, who were stripped, chained, and set aside.
Other groups followed, and the systematic killing went on for days. When the people complained to the Mongols that they were not keeping their oath to their gods, the Khan answered that he had promised not to kill those within the city, but that they were now outside its walls.
When none were left but a hundred of the city's best craftsmen with their families in one group, two thousand young women in another, and eighty thousand healthy men in a third, the killing stopped for a time.
While the butchering had been going on, and all the heads of the murdered stacked in neat pyramids, others of the horde had been systematically looting the city, although in fact most of the portable wealth had been in the baggage of the refugees.
The city was then burned, and the captive men were put to tearing down every wall, every palace, every mosque, and every hovel. When that was done, it still was not enough to satisfy the Khan. The captives were forced to dig a canal and then to dam the mighty Amu so that the river cut a new channel right through where the city had been. This destroyed the irrigation system, and without irrigation, the fields dried up and the very soil was blown away. Nothing was left of once beautiful Urgench that once held half a million people. The eighty thousand workers were then slaughtered and their heads added to the pyramids of skulls.
The Mongols made Hitler look like a piker, and Stalin look like small change.
Zoltan had been master alchemist of the city, and his family had been spared so that the Mongols might have something to threaten him with. This was also the case of the others in his small group.
The young women were taken off separately and never seen again. Zoltan's group was led off in the direction of Karakorum, the Mongol capital, with a guard of twenty men.
The prisoners were forced to cook for the guards, and Zoltan Was as knowledgeable of vegetation as he was of minerals. He concocted a poison from the roots of certain desert plants, and slipping it into their food, used it to kill all the guards.
He then led his people west, and for seven years they had wandered in search of a home, constantly thrown out of Christian lands because they were Moslems, thrown out of Moslem lands because they were considered heretics and deathly afraid of going near the lands of the Khan.
Once there had been over five hundred of them, but four out of five had been lost along the way. A hundred were all that were left from a city of half a million.
It was a pitiful story, and I felt sorry for these people. But dam it, I had problems of my own! I had to make sure that what happened to Urgench didn't happen to Cracow! To do that, I needed the continued support of the Church, of the state, and of my own people. Having this crowd of refugees around wasn't going to help.
They were Moslems, of a sort, but as best as I could tell, they were all members of some heretical sect. Or at least Zoltan said that all the other Moslems were heretics, so I guess it amounted to the same thing. That was the last thing that I needed. Members of small religious sects tend to be fanatics eagerly searching for converts. The Church was already conducting an inquisition concerning me, and if they found out that I was harboring and encouraging Moslems, and heretical Moslems at that, it could go bad for me. And if the refugees started making converts out of good Christians — well, I didn't want to think about it.
I got very firm on the point that his people were not to try to talk my people into joining his Church, or whatever one does to become a heretical Moslem.
He said that this was not a problem, and went into a long theological argument which I could not follow but that apparently proved to his satisfaction that we could never qualify to join his sect, and therefore no attempt would be made to save us.
This ticked me off even more! Where the hell did he get off telling me that I wasn't good enough to join his damned sect? I was good enough to join anything, not that I'd wanted to. By that point, it was pretty late, and I felt it best to call it a night. Much longer and I would have decked the bastard, and that's not how you're supposed to treat a guest.